Working with my boss, being somehow involved with him, meant confronting a possessive individual. He insisted that mental health only applied to the department and that everything else was merely optional. He even told me how to treat people, under the guise of helping me find my way, being a good person or something, all for his own benefit. He would find any excuse to make a friend of mine think I was a monster for continuing to see her, despite his repressive tactics to distance myself from him. I realized I was a monster because I didn't listen to him, because I didn't follow his control, and that I was going to harm others. God, what a sick man! And I'm glad that even after the tragedies in my country, I didn't ask about him, about his life, as if to make it clear to others that I wasn't with him, because there was no way he could understand that I wasn't. He would put his head on my shoulder as if I were his friend, buy me things to get me to give in, try to find out things about my life, want to change how I manage my family—in short, he wanted to interfere in everything, but I wouldn't let him. His constant threat was that if I didn't give in to his attempts to improve my situation, then I wasn't taking advice to get better and was therefore trying to harm others, my relationships with them, that he wasn't trying to make things right for everyone, but rather being guided by prejudice. Therefore, I always tried to corner him, to make it clear that he was trying to interfere in my life, no matter what. It's not pleasant to be with someone who's always trying to keep you under their control. In fact, he had the Secretary under his thumb, in the sense that he always made her bear his emotions and stress, but it could never be the other way around, unless it put him at risk. He was an extremely selfish individual, from whom the world desperately sought to escape, using any excuse. He was a man who thrived on normalizing his own will, even making it seem comical, subjecting one to his world of denials, always striving to dictate one's feelings toward him. He sought to confuse one, guided by the ambiguity of feelings regarding what he provoked, thus establishing the situation that one was with him, that one felt something for him, whatever the case may be. Of course, all this came at the cost of a range of stress that he didn't try to resolve, but rather burdened. His interactions with others consisted of pretending to know them in order to corner them, using their name to impose the truth about their relationship, resorting to talk of betrayals, disappointments, etc., all based on deception.

The man was completely unwell, and to top it all off, he was the boss. The man, as my friend rightly said, knew exactly what he was doing, because he was always positioning himself. He sought to preserve his group through extreme tolerance, so that others would understand that this is what a group is about: flaws but also virtues, all while making it seem as if the situation were normal. His way of acting in the world was to claim that he lived among these things and that he was tolerant, so that others would agree with him, however they might be, and also become supporters of exerting pressure, but from the outside, in support of him. The man was a monster, and I never saw him at his worst. The only time he tried—and it wasn't a serious attempt—he faced being humiliated everywhere in a medical or healthcare setting, precisely what he didn't want, and he completely destroyed his reputation. He begged me to stay with him, going from talking to making it a public matter, trying to increase the pressure by trying to get me to give in through his games, which I didn't find funny at all, but which he tried to make funny to elicit empathy from others and coerce them into isolating me with him. But my lack of laughter, instead of my well-expressed anger, made it clear that they were out of line. In fact, it was understood in the office that they were trying to mistreat me. What finally broke the camel's back, the tragedy of my country, was when he once tried to prevent me from going to the office alone, when they weren't there. He made this up as a pretext, without any ulterior motive, simply because others weren't going—nothing binding. However, I pointed this out as a reason for suspicion, because I could have gone alone to do some work. It was clear that he was on his own and from then on, all he observed was an effort to try to prevent more conflicts, whatever it took, to prevent more things from exploding, because many were ready to explode, because many were already resentful.

Many of us were fed up with him and wanted him out of the picture so we could live our lives as we pleased, a right we had firmly established. He wasn't interested in following the rules; instead, he used them as an excuse to do whatever he wanted and make himself look good, at the expense of others, no matter what. He even manipulated reality for this purpose, his sole aim being to instill fear of escaping his clutches. This led to truly painful and intense experiences, because people, like me, reached the point of desperately trying to get out of there, by any means necessary, since he wouldn't let them be free. Knowing him was like making a real misfortune. Luckily, even his secretary is no longer with him, not at all. She had been wanting to leave for a long time, just like me. I was his inspiration for abandoning him, leaving him without support, under the pretext of the tragedy. The tragedy in my country served as an excuse to leave him, to make it seem like that man hadn't earned a single penny. Perhaps the other authorities questioned this, but not him, because after my warning, his name was flagged. After the tragedy, amidst the destruction, he searched online for support at the office, using ambiguous messages, voicemails, and the classic "how are you?" My first reaction was to stick to what the general coordination had said, as an excuse to stay put, to avoid his messages, to make it seem like I was always busy, and also to force him to take responsibility. He expected me to close the line, to not respond, applauding the idea that I would leave him on read, a last-minute betrayal. But he didn't find that; instead, he received my last-minute notification that I was unavailable. I always suspected him, and everything I said was always in the interest of anything he might say about me that could cast doubt on him. It must be acknowledged that under different circumstances and with a different person, I would surely have resorted to more drastic measures with him, and I knew this firsthand because whenever I pointed out something that might suggest something very wrong, he would get scared. He is subtle in establishing his boundaries, occupying spaces in a non-scandalous way that others feel he shouldn't, giving the impression that something is out of place, but nothing is actually said. In fact, it's worse to report him because it's something that can be temporarily abandoned, but he takes advantage of this to lower morale and keep people at the mercy of conflict, thus controlling them at the whim of what he says, supposedly to prevent it. He always lives with the desire for absolute control.

My effort with him was to destroy him from where he found the most protection: the office. It was from there that he took control and did whatever he wanted with other people. His reputation stemmed from the fear of jeopardizing others' futures, something he would never have done himself, but he exploited that prejudice.

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